Maximizing your middleware

Ask any enterprise about its overall IT architecture or strategy, and it won’t be long before you’re taking a look at its middleware infrastructure and the services that are hosted there. This infrastructure is often key to an enterprise’s IT capabilities because many services hosted there are outward-facing, revenue generating applications. This infrastructure needs to be able to support applications to provide efficient performance despite demand, and ideally this need is carefully balanced against inefficient resource use. However, that balance is much easier said than done. In reality, it’s often the practice to statically configure environments for the peak demands of the system thus ensuring responsive services, but ultimately leading to resource and economic wastes during off-peak times. WebSphere Virtual Enterprise seeks to address this need for balance by extending the cloud computing concepts of virtualization and virtualization management to middleware and middleware applications.

You may be wondering how WebSphere Virtual Enterprise provides such balance. That brings us to a very important concept of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise. Dynamic provisioning of middleware and applications is directly linked to application performance. Application performance goals are stated to the system via application service policies. These goals are expressed in terms of both application responsiveness and the importance of achieving such responsiveness in relation to other applications deployed within the system. This allows for a quantitative description of what ‘good’ performance is, and it also allows users to separate business-critical applications from those that are a bit more secondary to the business. By linking provisioning directly to application performance, enterprises can be assured that resources are being allocated based on the needs of users of the system.

It’s nice to have the ability to state application service policies, but the policy is nothing if the system doesn’t have the ability to act on it. That’s where dynamic clusters and on demand routers (ODRs) enter the picture. Dynamic clusters provide the capability to expand and contract the number of middleware servers and associated applications that are available to serve requests. If the system notices service policies are being violated, more instances of servers hosting the application associated with the service policy can be started on the dynamic cluster. Conversely, if WebSphere Virtual Enterprise detects that service policies can be met with fewer resources, instances of servers can be stopped and resources reclaimed. It’s also important to point out that dynamic clusters can contain both IBM and non-IBM middleware components allowing the capabilities of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise to extend to many different technologies.

ODRs are the entry point into a WebSphere Virtual Enterprise environment and help to shape the request traffic entering the system. ODRs provide all the features of an HTTP 1.0/1.1 compliant proxy, and incorporate additional on demand features such as request prioritization, request queuing, request routing, and more. Intelligent request routing is achieved by balancing the current system load with the service policies of the application being requested to ensure members are targeted in a way that allows the system to meet the service goals. ODRs provide the necessary gate-keeping duties to most effectively utilize components of a WebSphere Virtual Enterprise environment.

The four short paragraphs above only begin to scratch the surface of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise. Its ability to provide dynamically-scaled, autonomic middleware and middleware applications can give companies a leg up over its competition by ensuring responsive services balanced against efficient resource use. In effect, WebSphere Virtual Enterprise helps companies implement a smarter middleware infrastructure. Click here to read more about WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter. If you have any questions about WebSphere Virtual Enterprise or cloud computing, send us an email at wscloud@us.ibm.com.